rolling "Is This Racist?" thread

it's racist, it's scary, it's dehumanizing and worse yet, Tom Petty pulled it off so much better in that one video.

So a committed anti-nationalist white woman ritually circumcizes a Willendorf Veunus shaped cake made by a black gay guy for an art day. There are so many buttons to push here, my mind boggles. The aesthetics are <insert adjective here that I can't even begin to think of>

I'm inclined to say this is not racist and just a really weird art piece that requires a lot of context to get. The Willendorf Venus + African/black artist + attempts to address issue of genital mutiliation (?) would indicate there's a good deal more going on here than meets the eye

it is still very WTF obviously

My brain can't reason its usual "it's okay because it's a black guy underneath that cake" argument.

I am reacting to this like it is an edible, interactive version of the Britney-giving-birth sculpture

…with Jeff Koons trapped inside.

I think shakey's right, certainly if you saw it by itself in an art gallery it would give you pause for thought. but when the picture is of a smiling white woman cutting into it surrounded by smiling and laughing white photographers - the o_O is overwhelming.

Yeah, which I'm assuming was, at least in part, what the artist was probably going for.

I'm kind of w/Laurel on this. Even if I give the Swedes involved the benefit of the doubt as a different culture, etc..., I still can't get over the idea of objectifying a victim whose plight one deplores into a red-centered cake.

If it's meant to be generate publicity through shock, it's probably relatively good value for money, though

what if the cake tastes terrible

well, now the world is aware of genital mutilation. sort of

no way man that red velvet stuff is the bomb

xp

once you go red velvet, you'll never reshelve it

I bet that's what it is, too

The ”maimed” corpse of an African woman has sparked an outcry in social media.

Left out the word "delicious".

did anyone else watch the video

bureaucrat swedes smiling appreciatively thru constant screaming from the cake.

wait what

this is like a Monty Python sketch come to life

holy shit

it's a very long 47 seconds

The screaming and what she whispered to him make this quite surreal

IMO the video answers the "is this racist?" question but raises about a bazillion others (foremost of which is "WAHT?")

did not make it through all 47 seconds

the thing is though the page we're reading the story from seems to have chosen "nig*er cake" as its own descriptive and then put it in quotes so I suspect there are some levels of Swedish politics here. OTOH I don't know how many levels it takes to get away from HOW IS THIS NOT A TERRIBLE IDEA.

After all the many headspinning aspects of this, I am now very curious where the phrase in quotes in that first FriaTider headline came from.

xp

mind blown

have to say that it's quite an impressive performance piece/sculpture/conceptual stunt, but i do not think i would have been able to eat any of that cake

the recommended youtubes that pop up are pretty O_o

"Let them not eat cake."

saw an episode of baseball wives where one wife gets another wife a realistic looking porcupine cake or something that also had red cake inside

There's lots of Sweish politics going on here: this is going viral because Swedish nationalists are pissed that she's cutting off state funding for their newspaper, so they're sending this around as a "gotcha!" moment.

saw an episode of baseball wives where one wife gets another wife a realistic looking porcupine cake or something that also had red cake inside

― dayo, Tuesday, April 17, 2012 12:51 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Steel Magnolias has a bit about the groom's cake at a wedding being in the shape of a giant armadillo with grey icing and blood red cake. Maybe the b-ball wives were spoofing that. Sounds p similar.

100% with aero here; my guess is that the cake itself is a piece of very transgressive and extreme performance art that somehow has federal funding. The original article linked to though only blocks out one of the 'g's in n----- and seems to have some sort of vendetta against one of the attendants for cutting funding to a nationalist newspaper who is known for spouting off 'racist' beliefs, so I'm actually wondering if the article itself is actually more racist than the cake...?

yeah TWU otm xxp. Like as shocking as the cake is, it is probably akin to like The Swans playing at George HW Bush's Inaugural Ball

As far as I can tell, Fria Tider (the website linked to above) is a right-wing Sweedish Nationalist news organisation.

The URL made the cake sound like it came from Niger.

that's what I was expecting

in retrospect, I don't really know why; possibly the clearest example of my subconscious blatantly lying to me in order to preserve my sanity I've had in a while

just popped up on my tumblr and figured it was relevant here wrt makode's race:

http://thankyoubasedsantorum.tumblr.com/post/21272281605
Apparently Makode (the artist behind "Painful Cake") is not a woman.

Can everyone see how this is not okay?

Look, we talk all the time about how black women’s pain is often co-opted or turned into a gimmick for white people’s goals—and we’ve even had great discussion about how people of color will do the same to black people. This is one of those times. I don’t know about Makode’s make-up, but I know they are not white. And this is bullshit.

At the end of the day, I don’t care what they were doing or what they thought they were going to accomplish—they put painful history of black women’s pain (not starting with but including the Venus Hottentot) on display for white people to “teach” them about said pain. I can’t even begin to describe how truly fucked up that is, and how it enrages me. Even within POC spaces, black women are at the bottom of the totem pole. Our pain is hung out to dry for the benefit of white people and when it backfires, it is even more worthless. If it can’t even be used for teaching fodder, what good is it?

I don’t care who Makode is; they are not for us. If they meant to shock, they could have done it with trivializing the pain of black women. If they meant to teach, they could’ve done so another way. I’m tired of our history supposedly being used for the benefit of other POC. Makode was allowed to be there, probably paid, invited to sit under a table and scream for the laughter and enjoyment of white people. That’s all it was. It didn’t do shit.

i'm glad i read this thread because having just seen the photo/read the article i was entirely ooooo_0000000

well, i still am, but less kneejerk condemnatory now that i know the political and artistic context, which i think a lot of those outraged tumblrers would do well to find out about.

god the phrase "POC" really gets no better.

well, the article was super suspect just from the headline; that alone made me think there was more going on than those still pictures could convey (the video amplified that even more)

which i think a lot of those outraged tumblrers would do well to find out about.

lol @ yr assumption that they don't

yeah learning that the newspaper was a right wing one made things make much more sense - if swedish newspapers of that kind are anything like british ones, they'll probably target modern art at every given opportunity, and conflate using offensive imagery with actually being offensive while pretending the context doesn't exist

xp it's right in the paragraph you quoted

I'm not sure how to feel about Makode Linde's performance/conceptual piece. It's clearly transgressive, deeply unsettling, awful in many ways, but it's not entirely without substance.

Perhaps the only acceptable response is to condemn Linde, as the author of that wonderfully named blog does, for representing something other than his own "designated group" and/or personal experience. That's the safest strategy, based on the idea that we're all allowed to comment on ourselves, on the group(s) to which we seemingly belong, and on those we see as our oppressors - but everybody else is off-limits. By this standard, a man simply isn't entitled to make gross, transgressive art about female genital mutilation in Africa, regardless of his race or intent.

This is at least a coherent and morally sensible position. But i don't know... I agree to a large extent and this is pretty much how I try to handle these issues in my own life, but at the same time, I'm somewhat bothered by the puritanical and legalistically rigid nature of this approach.

^ i'm responding there to the thankyoubasedsantorum.tumblr that zachylon linked

lex "i don't care" does not mean "i don't know"

I think the point made by that Tumblr is more that it was an appropriation of an experience that wasn't his and presented in a manner almost guaranteed to be offensive and misunderstood, showing a profound lack of empathy for the issues meant to be addressed by the piece in the first place.

Like, it's okay to talk about female genital mutilation in Africa, but it's not really okay to make yourself into a screaming edible cake if you want the issue to be taken seriously.

where is Issues That Can Be Addressed by Screaming Edible Cake poll

Guess I'll have to come up with something else besides my Anne Frank Strawberry Shortcake Surprise for NPR's next remote at the University.